“We were pouring all our energy into the client. But one day, we woke up and said we can do all kinds of things for the client but what if we’re alienating consumers,” said Larry Allen, a VP of ad product strategy for Turner Ignite, speaking at this week’s TV Data Summit in New York. “One of the things that didn’t come up was actually the consumer. We need them. TV is under siege and we need them to stay in ad-supported experiences.”
Keeping viewers in “ad-supported experiences” was a major focus of the New York conference where Allen was a keynote speaker and two sister gatherings on the future of advertising and television that were part of NYC TV Week.
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Unsurprisingly, in a gathering of the number crunchers, data scientists, analytics wizards and marketing gurus who populate the back-office operations of digital video, connected TVs and “traditional television,” there was lots of talk about how to better help advertisers buy ad time, build their brands, measure effectiveness and connect it all to a more explicit return on investment.
But Allen posed some of the most interesting questions about TV’s core challenge of the moment: how to pay for premium programming as audiences fragment across multiplying platforms and viewing options.
As audiences have drifted away, networks have experimented with shorter and fewer ads, down to as little as 6 seconds, trying to reduce ad loads that audiences said were too high. But that approach might be a mistake, Allen suggested.
“If you have a child and you’re trying to get them to eat vegetables, the solution is not to reduce the number of vegetables they eat. You need to find vegetables they like,” Allen said.
So Turner Ignite brought in groups of consumers in two markets for two-day workshops, trying to grow those better-tasting “vegetables.”
What resulted, Allen said, were 11 ad concepts, including “the popup shop, shop the show, flash sale, product placement redux, nostalgia, just the facts, remote-control voting.” Then they built ads around those concepts.
Every one of the new kinds of ads performed better with audiences than traditional ad spots, Allen said. All of them used data to better target the right viewers, and incorporated some interactive component. Regardless of the concept, however, it was important to audiences that “in no case do they want to feel like we’re taking them away from what they’ve been watching.”
That meant creating interactive functions that allow viewers to bookmark or save an ad or offer, or to create a reminder at the end of the show while there’s a moment to follow up. Just don’t break up the viewing experience.
“They really do not want you to mess with that experience,” Allen said.
Intriguingly, one of the popular new concepts proved to be a five-minute-long ad focused on a brand’s origin story. It sits in the middle of a show that has no other commercials. The key is telling a real story, Allen said, a narrative with purpose that doesn’t disrupt the show wrapped around it.
Turner’s Great Big Story unit has been building 2- to 10-minute stories with high production values that look and feel “like CNN,” for brands such as REI and Procter and Gamble’s social-responsibility positions, Allen said.
“The origin story is a manifestation of that,” Allen said. “You can’t tell that story in 15 or 30 seconds, and you damn sure can’t do it in 6 seconds. The other side of it is (you’re saying,) ‘This is who we stand for.'”
Another key term in Allen’s talk: context.
“It’s not just that you’re reaching the right audience, but where and when you’re reaching the right audience,” Allen said. That’s where targeting and better ad segmenting comes in.
More TV environments are now capable of addressable ads, such as online OTT services, connected/smart TVs and newer pay-TV systems. Broadcast will be able to do it in the future, as ATSC 3.0 technology rolls out fully over the next two to five years.
But addressable ads have been relatively slow to take off, according to a just-released eMarketer study.
The research company projected that while U.S. advertisers will spend $70 billion this year on television, just $2.1 billion of that will go to targeted, addressable ads. Just $1.7 billion will be spent on programmatic ads.
Connected TVs are showing great promise, however. The eMarketer study estimated that by the end of the year, 55 percent of the U.S. population will have connected TVs, up more than 8 percentage points in two years.
